The Way of the Superior Man

Thanks to Yolanda for sending me this excellent free ebook, "The Way of the Superior Man" by David Deida. This book has really opened my eyes to many important truths about relationships, spirituality, masculinity/femininity, and love. Even though it's called "The Way of the Superior Man," I highly recommend it for both men and women, as the wisdom transcends gender. Click the link above or have a look at some of my favorite quotes below. This post is dedicated to my #1 fan for 18 months :D Love you

"This book is a guide for a specific kind of newly evolving man. This man is unabashedly masculine—he is purposeful, confident, and directed, living his chosen way of life with deep integrity and humor—and he is sensitive, spontaneous, and spiritually alive, with a heart-commitment to discovering and living his deepest truth. This kind of man is totally turned on by the feminine. He loves to take his woman sexually, to ravish her, but not in some old-style macho fashion. Rather, he wants to ravish her with so much love she is vanished, they both vanish, in the fullness of loving itself. He is dedicated to incarnating love on this earth, through his work and his sexuality, and he does so as a free man, bound neither by outer convention nor inner cowardice. This newly evolving man is not a scared bully, posturing like some King Kong in charge of the universe. Nor is he a new age wimp, all spineless, smiley, and starry-eyed. He has embraced both his inner masculine and feminine, and he no longer holds onto either of them. He doesn't need to be right all the time, nor does he need to be always safe, cooperative, and sharing, like an androgynous Mr. Nice Guy. He simply lives from his deepest core, fearlessly giving his gifts, feeling through the fleeting moment into the openness of existence, totally committed to magnifying love ... It is time to evolve beyond the macho jerk ideal, all spine and no heart. It is also time to evolve beyond the sensitive and caring wimp ideal, all heart and no spine. Heart and spine must be united in a single man, and then gone beyond in the fullest expression of love and consciousness possible, which requires a deep relaxation into the infinite openness of this present moment. And this takes a new kind of guts. This is the Way of the Superior Man." -David Deida, "The Way of the Superior Man" (Intro)

"If a woman suggests something that changes a man's perspective, then he should make a new decision based on his new perspective. But he should never betray his own deepest knowledge and intuition in order to please his woman or "go along" with her. Both she and he will be weakened by such an action. They will grow to resent each other, and the crust of accumulated inauthenticity will burden their love, as well as their capacity for free action. You should always listen to your woman, and then make your own decision. If you choose to go with your woman's suggestion even when deep in your heart you feel that another decision is more wise, you are, in effect, saying, "I don't trust my own wisdom." You are weakening yourself by telling yourself this. You are weakening your woman's trust in you: why should she trust your wisdom if you don't? When you deny your deep truth to please your woman, everyone will feel your lack of authenticity. They will sense that your false smile hides an inner division. Your friends, children, and business colleagues may love you, but they won't trust you, since you don't trust your own core intent. And, more importantly, your own sense of inauthenticity will burden your capacity to act with clarity. Your actions won't jibe with your core. However, if you listen to your woman, taking everything she says into account and making your own best decision, then you are acting in accordance with your core. You are saying, in effect, "My deepest wisdom is leading me to this decision. If I amwrong, I will learn from it, and my wisdom will have deepened. I'm willing to be wrong, and grow from it. I trust this process of acting from my deepest wisdom." This attitude of self-trust engenders others' trust in you. You may be wrong, but you are willing to find out, and thus grow from the experience. You are open to listening to others, but in the end, you will take the responsibility for making your own decision. There is nobody else to blame. However, if you give up your real decision to follow your woman's, then you will blame her for being wrong if she is wrong, and you will feel disempowered if she is right, having denied yourself the opportunity to act from your core and grow from your mistakes. Be open to changing your feeling based on whatever your woman might reveal to you—through her words or her body language—and then make your own decision, based on your deepest intuitive wisdom and knowledge. You may make the right decision or the wrong one, but whatever happens, it is your best shot, and you will strengthen your capacity for future action." (15-17)

"A woman often seems to test her man's capacity to remain unperturbed in his truth and purpose. She tests him to feel his freedom and depth of love, to know that he is trustable. Her tests may come in the form of complaining, challenging him, changing her mind, doubting him, distracting him, or even undermining his purpose in a subtle or not so subtle way. A man should never think his woman's testing is going to end and his life will get easier. Rather, he should appreciate that she does these things to feel his strength, integrity, and openness. Her desire is for his deepest truth and love. As he grows, so will her testing." (47)

"Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge. The most erotic moment for a woman is feeling that you are Shiva, the divine masculine: imperturbable, totally loving, fully present, and all-pervading. She cannot move you, because you already are what you are, with or without her. She cannot scare you away, because you already penetrate her in fearless love, pervading her heart and body. She cannot distract you, because your one-pointed commitment to truth will not bend to her wiles. Feeling this hugeness of love and freedom in you, she can trust you, utterly, and surrender her testing in celebration of love. Until she wants to feel you as Shiva again. And then the testing will begin anew. In fact, it is precisely when you are most Shiva-like that she will most test you. Perhaps you have been working toward some financial goal, and finally you have succeeded. After months or years of effort, you have creatively earned a large amount of money. You feel happy, full, successful. You feel great. You come home to your woman and want to share the news with her.

"I just made a million dollars today."

"That's nice."

"That's nice!!?? You know how hard I've been working for this."

"I know. It feels like I haven't seen you in months. Did you remember to pick up the milk on the way home?"

"Oh, sorry. I forgot. But who cares? We could buy a dairy farm now!"

"I asked you to pick up the milk three times this morning, and I put a note on your briefcase. How could you forget?"

"I said I'm sorry. Look, I'll go get the damn milk...."

Why is she being this way? Because she simply wants to deflate your success? No. She is challenging you because your success doesn't mean shit to her, unless you are free and loving. And if you are free and loving, nothing she says can collapse you. She wants to feel you are uncollapsable, so she pokes you in your weak spot. Of course she knows how much this moment of success means to you. This is precisely why she is negating it. Not because she wants to hurt you. But because she wants to feel Shiva. She wants to feel your strength. She wants to feel that your happiness is not dependent on her response, nor on you making a million dollars. She wants to feel you are a superior man." (47-49)

"Keeping your word" is a masculine trait, in men or women. A person with a feminine essence may not keep her word, yet it is not exactly "lying" In the feminine reality, words and facts take a second place to emotions and the shifting moods of relationship. When she says, "I hate you," or "I'll never move to Texas," or "I don't want to go to the movies," it is often more a reflection of a transient feeling-wave than a well considered stance with respect to events and experience. On the other hand, the masculine means what it says. A man's word is his honor. The feminine says what it feels. A woman's word is her true expression in the moment… Whenever you are surprised by your woman's actions, and you say to her, "But you said...," you are forgetting that she has a feminine essence. What your woman says is like a cloud passing in the sky: well-formed, coherent, and unrecognizable moments later. The cloud is an expression of the precise physics of water, wind, and air. Your woman's words are expressions of the physics of her feelings, your relationship, and the nuances of the present situation, seen and unseen. A moment later, these factors will change, and so will your woman's expressions. You might ask her, "Do you want to go to the movies?"

She might reply, "Not really."

Then you hug her and spin her around and say, "Let's go to the movies!"

And she says, "OK!"

She is not talking about her desire to go to the movies. She is talking about the feeling of your relationship in the present moment. If after she said she didn't want to go to the movies, you said fine and sat down to watch TV, you would be missing the point. She is not really saying she doesn't want to go to the movies, even though that is what she's saying. This is not lying. For a man, or for anyone speaking in the masculine style, to say something that is not true is lying. But, for the feminine, truth is a thin concept compared to the thickness of her flow of feelings. The "truth" of the feminine is whatever she is really feeling, in this present moment." (56)

"When a woman gets emotionally intense, a mediocre man wants to calm her down and discuss it, or leave and come back later when she is "sane." A superior man penetrates her mood with imperturbable love and unwavering consciousness. If she still refuses to live more fully in love, after a time, he lets her go. If you are like most men, you probably aren't too fond of feminine bad moods and hysterical emotions. You may find yourself wondering, why is she so complicated? What's her problem? You may find yourself saying, "Just calm down and take it easy." The feminine bad mood is so foreign and dark to you that you may actually find it somewhat repulsive. And when your woman really goes wild, a part of you is afraid of the damage she might do. Her emotions are so much more wild and less predictable than yours that you'd rather not be around them. Basically, most men are afraid of, or disgusted by, feminine emotions. That's why you try to fix them or escape from them. "I'll come back later when you can act like a reasonable human being," you might say. One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present, and unreactive in the midst of his woman's emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax. The way you relate to your woman's chaos reflects the way you react to the chaos of the world. If you are the kind of man who needs everything placed neatly in its nice little box, then you will also try to box your woman's emotions. If you are the kind of man who would rather hire other people to take care of the chaos in your attic, or the chaos of your finances, you would probably also rather leave it to someone else to take care of the chaos of your woman. You can, however, train yourself to master the world—financially, creatively, spiritually—by learning how to be free and loving in the chaos of your woman's emotions. And you do so by standing your ground and loving so strongly that only love prevails. You can't quit when you seem to fail, but rather, you must learn from your failures and return to love. Give your gift. Like wrestling a steer or surfing ocean waves, mastery involves blending with your woman's powerful energy and feeling the rise and fall of the moment, without lapsing in presence for a second." (73-74)

"Your woman says, "How can you spend so much time in front of the TV when our rent is due in a few days, we're behind on car payments, and you just lost your job?"

"Don't worry about it. I have a job interview tomorrow."

"Well, why don't you get off your butt! You said you were going to clean out the garage weeks ago. I can hardly get to the car!"

"OK. OK. I'll clean the garage this afternoon."

Your woman stops talking and goes about her business, but you can feel her simmering anger and tension. You don't like to be around her when she's like this. You want to get out of the house. "I'll be back in a few hours and I'll clean the garage," you say, as you grab your coat and head for the door. You hear a glass break in the kitchen, so you go in and find your wife furious. "I can't take this any more!" she wails.

"What? I said I'd clean the garage. What's going on?" you wonder.

"I just can't take it!" she cries out, pulling away from you, closing up, and not letting you touch her.

"I don't get it. I said I'd clean the garage. I have a job interview tomorrow. Everything is going to be fine. What do you want?"

You've probably had some version of this conversation with your woman. It holds a key to masculine growth in freedom. And it reveals a common mistake men make with their women. The thing your woman is complaining about is rarely the thing she is complaining about. It is a mistake to believe the content of what she is saying, and then respond to her complaints, point by point. When she complains about financial issues, she is usually feeling a lack in your masculine capacity to direct your life with clarity, purpose, integrity, and wisdom. The money itself is secondary. If you were poor but totally conscious, happy, full of integrity, fearless, humorous, loving and giving your fullest gift to the world and to your woman, she wouldn't complain about lack of money. When you say you will clean the garage, and then weeks pass by and you haven't, her complaint isn't really about the garage. Sure, she'd like a clean garage, but this is a superficial issue. The deeper issue is that you didn't do what you said you would. You gave her your word, and you didn't follow through. She can't trust what you say. And this hurts her, deeply. She might seem to be overreacting to you. Why is she so hysterical? It's only a garage. But she can feel your lack of integrity. Not having cleaned the garage yet seems like a small thing to you, but it shows that you don't follow through with your word, with your purpose. Your word is a demonstration of your purpose, of your masculine core. When you don't follow through with what you say you are going to do, she feels that your masculine core is weak. She feels let down. She can't trust your masculine direction. And so she feels a great loss. Over time, she will begin to build up her own masculine protection against your lack of integrity. She will begin to guard herself against the hurt that your lack of carry through causes. She will harden herself, becoming angular and tense. To you, the garage seems trivial. To her, you have failed at your word. She can't trust you." (118-120)

"If she can't trust you with living your life from your deepest wisdom and fullest capacity, she can't trust you with her life. She can't trust your masculine impeccability, so she naturally will compensate by overdeveloping her own. She is not only being masculine for herself, now she's being masculine for you. If she's got to remind you of the job interview or the mess in the garage, she's supplying the masculine direction for the both of you. And this results in stress. Her body will begin to show it. She will become less radiant and less relaxed in her feminine power and glory because she has to compensate for your failure." (122)

"A man's track record means nothing to the feminine. A man could be perfect for ten years, but if he's an asshole for 30 seconds his woman acts like he's always been one. The feminine responds to the moment of energy, forgetting her man's history of past behavior. A man's past behavior is irrelevant to his woman's feeling in the moment. But men base much on another man's history of behavior, so they think their own track record should count for something. But to a woman, it doesn't. For you as a man, it is probably easier to forgive and forget an occasional mistake made by another man who has a great track record. What pisses you off is when a man lacks integrity and continually fails at his word. But even big mistakes are fairly easy to let go of when made by a man who is otherwise impeccable. You know he really does his best, and this mistake was a rare exception. But, for the feminine, the past is entirely irrelevant. One wrong word in the midst of a five hour lovemaking session that was otherwise perfect could collapse your woman as completely as if you had spent two hours making mistakes. Instead of getting angry because she's so upset that you made one little mistake in a long series of successes, instantly shift the energy between you. Remember, history is irrelevant to the feminine, so your mistake is as easily forgotten as your successes. As soon as you see she's upset, immediately assume happiness. Shock her with your love." -David Deida, "The Way of the Superior Man (127-8)